Counterfeit laser products

In the past year, new web sites have been surfacing on the internet and trying to pass off their inferior counterfeit lasers as name brands or being equal to these same name brand lasers.
Just recently we received for repair what the owner had thought was an RPL laser. As soon as it was taken out of it's packaging it didn't feel right.
It didn't weigh as much as the RPL and it didn't have the solidly built feel of the RPL. I opened it up to see what it looked like internally and it didn't have either the lithium-ion battery protection circuit or any driver board for the laser module, only a resistor to limit current. The IR diode was a 1 watt diode (from China) vs the 2.5Watt n-Light (made in USA) diode.The crystal was around 1/3rd the size of the crystal in an RPL.
Externally they looked very much the same. The owner was very upset when I gave him the news that he had bought a counterfeit, saying that he had only had for 5 weeks and had only ~1 hour of use on it

How to tell:An RPL laser will either come directly from Optotronics or purchased 2nd hand from another party.A real RPL laser will always include all of the following items.• LG-2600mAhr 18650 battery with charger Padded laser carrying case like the one shown on our RPL web page. • Will include operating instructions from Optotronics.• Include the Optotronics gold corporate seal and measured output power. • 12 month standard warranty on the RPL. • Official RPL label of output power range. To learn more about fake and counterfeit products, visit StopFakes.gov Shop carefully, a real RPL will give you years of high performance and reliability, while a cheap counterfeit will never perform to it's rated output level and outright fail in short order.